This chapter contextualises what it is to build an academic identity as a woman or other marginalised gender in STEM, and the particular challenges faced by these individuals. In the chemical sciences, the progression and retention of marginalised groups including women is an issue, and the barriers they face are intersectional. We consider academic identity – that is, what it means to be an academic and to succeed in academia – and the pressures faced by early-career academics in general. We discuss the concept of wellbeing in the context of acceleration and overwork in neoliberal academia before turning to the particular barriers faced by women and mothers (and those with caring responsibilities). Finally, we explore leaving academia, and options open to those with a science PhD.

Academic identity

Being an academic is something that is often bound up with a fair amount of mysticism and misperception. In movies and books, academia and campus life can be portrayed as some kind of halcyon idyll, with young people willing to learn, experiment, and have fun under the benevolent guidance of wiser men (and they very often are assumed to be men – a Google image search of ‘what does a professor look like’ displayed 29 white men in the first 22 images returned by this search in June 2021). However, in more recent times this has changed, with academics portrayed as ‘the bookish but socially challenged swot or the egomaniac self-publicist that communicates his or her elevated status at every available opportunity’.1(p68) Les Back goes on to say:

Academics themselves don’t much like other academics, and often feel a deep estrangement from their colleagues as people. Perhaps part of the problem is that our forms of self-presentation are tied to the modern academic desire to be taken seriously – that is, the embodiment of entrepreneurialism, ‘being smart’ and ‘world-class’ braininess.

Back, along with other commentators and researchers, blames the shifts seen in the ‘modern academic’ on the neoliberal university, which captures academics’ dispositions towards hard work and achievement and overlays them with demands. Back states that ‘Academics should see themselves first as teachers’.1(p46) but this sentiment is at odds with advice given to early-career academics to focus instead on their research, grant income, and markers of esteem in order to attain success.2 Teaching, while an integral component of the kinds of professional and educational development courses found for early-career researchers in the UK, Australia, and parts of Europe, is not recognised or rewarded in the same way as conventional research outputs or cold hard cash.3

The current accelerated pace of the academic world is sometimes termed ‘fast academia’.4 Work is experienced like a treadmill,5 with the associated symptoms of overwork and illness endemic.6,7 Universities have to run as businesses, with the purpose of higher education changing from individual transformation to producing goods and workers for the knowledge economy.8 Squeezing budgets to maximise profit results in a need for academics to increase the speed and productivity of their work without losing quality – though, as Bourdieu says, ‘you can’t think when you’re in a hurry’.9(p28) Speed and acceleration of this kind is tied to the political economy of capitalism.4

Many universities are including career maps as part of their promotion and progression pathways, laying out indicators and criteria that are expected to be met at certain stages on the road to seniority. The goal at the end for many is the elusive full-time permanent contract, and the title of professor as their reward for producing ‘world-class ground-breaking research’, achieving excellence across all aspects of their administration, service, teaching, and research, with the hierarchy weighted heavily towards the prestige of research. Steps along the way, post-PhD, might include securing a position as a postdoctoral researcher, then, after a faculty position, promotion from Assistant Professor or Lecturer to Associate Professor (securing tenure in the US) or Senior Lecturer/Reader. Neoliberal academia has led to the casualisation of higher education, with post-docs as well as adjunct or zero-hours faculty hired to cover teaching and administrative duties on precarious contracts creating an excessively bottom-heavy pyramid structure. In addition, there are ‘far fewer women than men at the top of the academic hierarchy; they are paid less and are much less likely to have had children’.10(p3) Navigating this pathway (map notwithstanding) can be incredibly overwhelming for an early-career academic (see Figure 3.1).

Figure 3.1:
Figure 3.1:

Being an early career researcher is like fighting a giant squid

While much has been written on academic identity and how this is achieved and supported, generally it must be recognised that the pathway and requirements in STEM are different from social sciences or arts and humanities. There are commonalities, such as the need to author publications, bring in research money, and build a reputation, but the leap to becoming an independent researcher (from post-doc), together with running a research group and building a lab, are unique to science. One of the easiest ways to conceptualise this is perhaps when considering research leave or sabbatical. Sabbatical is often used within the social sciences and humanities to take time out of the office, away from teaching and administration duties, in order to write a monograph. These long texts or books are seen as necessary to achieve promotion and progression. While they may have less kudos in research assessment exercises than peer-reviewed journal articles, they remain the lingua franca for a successful academic. In science, however, books or monographs beyond textbooks (which are generally not recognised as research) are virtually unknown. For a scientist to progress in research, they often need to spend more time in the lab, and more time with their postgraduate students. Although there are benefits to sabbatical trips such as visiting other labs or institutions to form new networks and collaborations or learn new skills, being away from their own campus day-to-day would not progress their career or research as they need to be present for their lab groups. Unfortunately, this feeds into the perception that in order to achieve in science, the best thing to do is commit to overwork – that is, to work all the hours into evenings, weekends, and forgo any work–life balance at all. Life becomes a round of chasing ideas, becoming a pathway more openly accessible to those with the time available to dedicate to the job, with good support networks, and to those without additional caring responsibilities.

Wellbeing in academia

Academia is often seen as more than just a job; instead, it becomes part of a person’s identity, spilling over into every aspect of their life,11 which results in overwork. In the context of overwork, academics’ wellbeing is often forgotten.12 However, there has been a proliferation of ‘self-help’ books aimed at academics, entreating them to gain balance,13 be happy in their chosen career,14 or advising them how to leave academia successfully.15 Such books are aimed at all those involved in academia, regardless of gender, contract type, or marginalised status. Wellbeing as an academic may seem something of a holy grail. When Jen L told the collaborative autoethnography group that she had bought a book called How to be a Happy Academic,14 the response from the rest was derisive laughter that there could ever be such a thing, since a happy academic still would not have time to write such a book, and who else would know? Everyone in the group has chosen to be an academic, and would like to be happy, but it will take more than a ‘how-to’ book to accomplish this.*

In a study exploring how academics with an embodied practice (such as yoga, running, meditation, and the like) expressed the tension between a non-judgemental ethos and their academic work, which was critical, cognitive, and competitive, Jen L described wellbeing in the context of academic overwork:

Wellbeing is a funny concept, apart from a lack of consensus over how it is spelt, there are many discourses over what it actually means. The UK National Account of Well-being16 defines it as a dynamic thing, a sense of vitality that people need to undertake meaningful activities, to help them feel autonomous and as if they can cope. However, as Richard Bailey puts it, ‘many of these discussions take it for granted that wellbeing equates to mental health’.17(p795) In turn, mental health seems to be conflated with being ‘happy’, or with factors that are personal, and to do with whether life is going well for the individual or not. Griffin18 explicitly connects wellbeing with happiness, similar to Aristotle’s idea of it being the fulfilment of human nature.19 Philosophically, wellbeing can be associated with either a hedonistic ‘desire fulfilment’, whereby it is achieved when an individual has sated their desires, or as a more objective theory which judges whether things are good for people or not.20 This latter view is one which sometimes results in lists of factors that indicate wellbeing or quality of life21 and quantitative measures of wellbeing.22 However, quality of life should be seen as a dimension of wellbeing rather than be conflated as the same thing.23 Practices that increase awareness and the quality of consciousness have been reliably shown to have a significant role in increasing wellbeing.24 Embodied practices such as yoga, mindfulness, and Authentic Movement, a structured dance form that draws on Jungian principles,25 contribute to wellbeing through enhancing this sense of present awareness and a wholeness of mind, body, and spirit.26 Wellbeing is often measured quantitatively, and yet if we are looking for embodied answers to research questions, how should we go about collecting data?12(pp224–225)

The answer to this, as far as this book is concerned, as described in Chapter Two, and as will be shown in Chapters Six and Seven, is to triangulate or create a mosaic of data from different sources – including that from collaborative autoethnography, images, fiction as research (in the form of vignettes), surveys, and ethnography – so that we can capture and share lived experiences, increase the visibility of challenges, such as those detailed previously within this chapter – for example, the spread of work into life and lack of balance – and find ways to ameliorate or banish them.

Women and mothers in academia

Achieving success in academia or ‘storming the tower’ is ‘a lonely business, as any woman in academia who has tried can tell you. Even with the support of other feminists in one’s own institution or country the sense of isolation can be overwhelming’.27(p1) We should note here, of course, that feminists do not have to be women. However, more women in academia are on casual, fixed-term, or precarious contracts.28 The pathway to seniority is not always clear,10 particularly in a context where admitting struggles undermines professorial identity,29 and where minorities (including women) are also battling other barriers. The rules of academia can seem opaque:

a commonly used informal description of the upper echelons of academia is a network of ‘old boys clubs’ … [which] remain highly effective for their members, exclusionary to women, and … play a tacit role in recruitment and selection, and the furtherance of [some] men’s academic careers to the detriment of their women counterparts.30(p91)

Some men still believe that ‘cutting edge science and engineering remain out of reach of the vast majority if not all women’.31(p49)

In science, women’s experience of academia is often mediated by their experience of motherhood or perceptions of what it might be like to be a mother (or not) in academia, and when they might fit in having a baby32 (see vignette this chapter and Figure 3.2). Motherhood in academia can be seen as a fleshy contrast to the ‘academy’s “floating head” syndrome; how people are expected to function as disembodied brains, not connected to bodies or families outside of academic pursuits’.33(pp51–52) Babies and children are the antithesis of ‘floating heads’, full as they are of milk, snot, vomit, sh*t, and very obvious and present visceral needs. The tension between motherhood and academic success is felt across every discipline.34–36 Mary Ann Mason describes children as ‘a wonder and a blessing, not a problem; but motherhood is. Child rearing does not occur in a vacuum; decisions about motherhood are bound up with societal expectations, the nature of the workplace (and how it works for or against mothers), and women’s personal needs during various life stages’.37(p7) This is not helped by the fact that the age at which the majority of women have to focus on establishing their post-PhD academic careers occur when they are often in their mid-to-late 20s to 30s, meaning ‘the career clock and the biological clock are on a collision course’.37(pxvii) Indeed, some women advise others to intentionally put their careers on hold while they have a young family: ‘If I could give you a gift, it would be the patience to recognize that childhood is precious and fleeting and that science will be waiting for you with some awesome mysteries when your children become adults’.38(p66) Women often defer having children until later in life, as ‘they fear that they will not be taken seriously’”37(p15) if they have a child as a student or postgraduate. Success in academia is ‘measured by productivity, not time, and assistant professors tend to put in long hours in order to meet departmental expectations … Mothers are less likely to travel to attend conferences to present their research findings to other scholars – a critical step in career advancement’.37(p37)

Figure 3.2:
Figure 3.2:

The constant question of how to time family into the career motorway before the stork crashes into the brick wall of age

In science, the idea of advancing your career, of being seen to be successful and productive is key:

The scientist who toils away in the lab, tied to her lab bench at all hours, skipping meals and hunkering down to finish just one more grant application, is not pregnant. She is not running out the door at 2:30 pm to pick up the kids. In fact, to do so would be considered disloyal and unscientific in the patriarchal culture of academia.29(p77)

Academia, just like much of society, is patriarchal,39 and this is particularly evident in science:40

many successful male scientists have a multitasking primary caregiver wife who tends to carry the domestic load, or at the other end of the spectrum, there is the male scientist whose partner or spouse is an academician and typically a few steps behind him on the career path. In contrast, the highly successful female scientists advance their careers within a very small spectrum. Either their partner/spouse works full-time outside the home and typically holds a high powered job or they are single.41(p99)

In 1995, 66% of women scientists and engineers were married to male scientists and engineers, and women remain more likely than men to have academic partners.42 The scarcity of senior women in science who have had successful relationships and families is a stark reminder to young women that historically they would have to make a choice between their career and a being a mother.40 Mason and Ekman write:

mothers who do persist do remarkably well. They don’t do as well as men, but they compete favourably with women who don’t have children … The most successful take parental leave following childbirth for a few weeks or a few months and then return as full-time workers … Somehow these mothers overcome the emotional and physical pull of the infant and the forbidding judgement of a society which increasingly sends the message that mothers who can afford to stay at home should do so.37(p53)

The need to return to work quickly after childbirth may be due to fear that ‘in competitive fields, a person who takes time off from work may be “scooped” and miss out on, or at least delay, a chance for career advancement’.43(p104) In the collaborative autoethnography group, women PIs shared experiences of having to respond to reviewers’ comments on papers and grants while caring for a new-born baby. Academic work of this kind cannot easily be passed to someone else to complete: ‘balancing career with family, particularly at the time of childbirth, is perceived to jeopardize the careers of women scientists and engineers more than any other single factor’.42(p43) The expectation that in order to succeed a mother has to ‘overcome’ the natural pull towards their own child and minimise the time they spend with them while young for the sake of the career is disturbing and discriminatory: ‘nearly half the female scientists in the US leave full-time science after their first child is born. In comparison, 80 percent of male postdocs and female postdocs without children stay in science’.44(p209)

The struggle of the working mother is nothing new.45 Aviva Brecher, who described herself as an ‘over-sixty baby boomer scientist’, in 200846(p25) wrote of her fellow women scientists: ‘it is astonishing that they are asking today the same questions about how to successfully manage and blend careers in science with the demands of motherhood and family life that we struggled to solve thirty years ago’. The assumption that women have a ‘second shift’ at home after work, comprising the bulk of the childcare, and the emotional labour of running a family (if not the physical duties on top), is also not new. For many scientists, the idea of returning to work part-time is unrealistic, as the aspect of work that gets reduced is research rather than the more time-consuming duties of administration, service, or teaching. In order to succeed, they have to find a way to do it all. Balancing a career with a family slows down the careers of women scientists, but not those of male scientists.42 This is not to say that the skills they learn as a working mother are not valuable; A. Pia Abola writes:

I know that the time I spent at home caring for my children has made me a much better scientist. I am more efficient with my time and better at planning and prioritizing; I am more pragmatic and goal-orientated; I am humbler and better at dealing with overcoming my own shortcomings and those of others; and I am better at negotiation and compromise; and I am much better able to tolerate the tedium and myriad little failures that accompany work at the bench.47(pp125–126)

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought new challenges to women in academia. In addition to the broader struggles around scarcity of research funding,48 increased redundancies in the sector,49 and the emotional impact of living through a pandemic,50,51 additional burdens have been placed on women and mothers. Early data suggested that there was an impact on women’s ability to publish, with comparative rates declining when compared to those of men.52 WISC’s second survey showed that for the majority of PhD students or post-docs without caring responsibilities lockdown was a productive time, although this was not true for those responsible for research groups53 (see Chapter Seven). Some male academics with children also found this period productive (see, for example, one man who wrote a book in six weeks while his wife took on responsibility for their children and home).54 For many women, however, the coronavirus outbreak was a time that led to decreased opportunities for work, increased load of home duties (such as schooling children55), and increased emotional labour.56 At the time of writing, work on women’s experiences of mothering through COVID-19 is beginning to appear in print. Mothering as a journey is not uncomplicated, as for many it brings together the challenges of being a woman, the expectations of society, and the responsibility of caregiving.36 Mothers share a host of personal reflections and short chapters edited by Andrea O’Reilly and Fiona Joy Green in Mothers, Mothering and COVID-19: Dispatches from a Pandemic. The book highlights the ‘“third shift” – the emotional and intellectual labour of motherwork’,57(p20) and gives evidence to support the claim that the pandemic has had a devastating effect on gender equality. In a report from Kris ‘Fire’ Kovarovic, Michelle Dixon, Kirsten Hall, and Nicole Westmarland The Impact of COVID-19 on Mothers Working in UK Higher Education Institutions,58 they looked to explore the impact and experiences of mothers of children under 18 working in UK higher education and share examples of good practice across the sector. Using a combination of interviews and an online survey, they found that, unsurprisingly, mothers took on the burden of responsibility for childcare, and that this had a negative impact on their physical and mental health. Mothers had less time for self-care. In contrast, the majority said that their workload had increased, but the quality of their work had been affected, primarily due to combining paid work with childcare. Over 80% said that it was impossible to work uninterrupted from home. Over half said that this had already negatively impacted their career progression through missed opportunities. A similar combination of pressures was felt by the mothers in our own research (see Figure 3.3). Kovarovic and colleagues58 found that expectations of ‘business as usual’, poor communication, too many changes, and uneven use of furlough or leave, along with too many meetings, lack of suitable home-working equipment, and hiring and/or pay freezes were unhelpful responses from institutions. In contrast, initiatives such as: giving teaching or marking relief; cash payments to say ‘thank you’ for work during the pandemic; bold, decisive decisions communicated clearly (such as cancelling all first-year students’ exams); and carers’ funds to help with additional childcare costs were all given as examples of best practice that led to staff feeling valued. Mothers who had been recipients of initiatives like these said that they felt as though their wellbeing was prioritised, they were allowed to do their jobs, and this best practice helped mitigate fear of future impact on their careers.

Figure 3.3:
Figure 3.3:

Carrying it all

Leaving academia

Gender balance and marginalisation in academia is not the same across the academic disciplines. This is in part due to scientific approaches, assumptions around gender, and the constitution of concepts such as rigour and validity, which are embedded from school teaching and texts. It is ‘old news’ that not a single woman scientist was named in the UK 2020 single science GCSE syllabus. According to the Royal Society of Chemistry, the chemical sciences have a particular issue with retention and progression of women, and stated in 2019 (pre-pandemic and any gender-based concerns that lockdown has raised) that at the current rate of change we will never reach gender parity. If the positions of power within science are predominantly white and male, this ‘sends a message to our undergraduate and graduate students, half of whom are female.”.37(p107) In higher education science, where textbooks are often used on reading lists, and are authored by senior (white, male) scientists, achieving a gender balance (and decolonising) science is not easily achieved. The nature of learning and knowledge and the types of skills is particular to STEM, and, as discussed in Chapter Two, rarely includes reflective practices. This, in turn, impacts on how women and marginalised groups construct their identity, and process and disseminate their experiences. Further, this lack of diversity among scientific leaders ‘may allow unintentional, undetected flaws to bias … research.”.42(p182) It is well known that women and those who are marginalised leave the sciences. This problem is broadly known as a leaky pipeline59 – a term that in itself is problematic60 – but how can we fix this and keep women in science?

One challenge is the dominance of the perception that if you have a PhD, then you ‘should’ aspire to remain in academia. This is reinforced by attitudes that might be vocalised to colleagues, such as ‘if they’re not going to stay then you might as well give up trying to get them to produce work of a decent standard’.** To an aspiring academic this attitude reinforces the belief that if you cannot find a job then it is down to your failure, your inability to work hard enough, or simply not being good enough. The reality is that the vast majority of those who graduate with a PhD do not remain in academia. In the UK, HEPI (the Higher Education Policy Institute) reported that 67% of PhD students aspired to continue working in academia, but only 30% were still doing so three and a half years after graduation.61 In the sciences, an even smaller fraction continue on to full-time permanent positions, as many leave during the ‘post-doc years’.62 Career options for science doctoral graduates can include working in industry, in professions allied to industry, law, patent attorney, finance, teaching, editing (for example, for specialist scientific journals), science communication, research support (for universities or funding bodies), among others. However, for many, leaving academia can feel like failure, or so they are told.63 The disconnect between industry and academia is in part due to the lack of ‘employability’ preparation that many PhD students receive in their training.61 Professors can be oblivious of other options for their students, or unwilling to see them, and either cannot prepare them because they have not seen life outside academia themselves, or fail to prepare them for the reality of other work because they do not value it. Either way, students can be left unclear on how they might actively utilise the skills they have acquired.15 One woman who had recently left academia to pursue a career in industry, leading a drug development programme, drew an image to express how she felt (Figure 3.4). She described how she had been pruned into a certain shape driven by the needs and demands of academia, only to find that her new industrial bosses had other motivators (profit). While EDI policies and practices may be enforced differently outside of academia, the barriers against women and other minorities do not simply disappear. The next chapter will look in detail at the impact of discrimination in science. The number of women continuing to senior positions is still small compared to the proportion of those graduating, as is also the case for those with other protected EDI characteristics such as race or disability.

Figure 3.4:
Figure 3.4:

My ideas being ‘trimmed’ to only keep the few viable and profitable ones

Adi, 23, International PhD student

I don’t think I want to stay in academia. I don’t know what I want to do yet; there’s a big part of me that wants to use my degree as I have worked so hard and spent so much time on it, but I don’t think academia is for me. For one thing I don’t see any faculty who look like me – there aren’t any Black women in my department. I look at my supervisor and see all the hours she works. Last year I know she was in the lab until 11 or 12pm every night. She tells us that she has to work that much just to get things done. She’s not even a professor yet. There never seems to be any time to take stock of where we are and everything we’ve done – as soon as something works we just move on to the next thing. Before COVID we used to celebrate in the pub if the group published a paper, but these days it just doesn’t happen. It can’t happen. I don’t think it’s only my supervisor either. I remember how burnt out all my lecturers looked when I was an undergrad. Always rushing from one thing to another. It’s not that they didn’t help – they did or I wouldn’t be here now – but I don’t think it’s what I want for myself. Someone I know got a job as a lecturer straight after a post-doc. Almost unheard of right? But he has to do so much teaching and with everything online I can see that it’s almost breaking him. At least my group isn’t as bad as some. One friend I know is expected to work 11 hours a day 6 days a week and her supervisor regularly sets meetings at 8pm on a Friday night. I don’t think I could cope with that; I want to have a life!

Even doing this is stressful. I cannot tell you the levels of stress that I just seem to cope with on a day-to-day basis and see as normal now! Worrying about not getting enough data, worrying when things don’t work, worrying that I am not living up to the huge sacrifices I made to come here. So much worry and fear. Leaving my family and boyfriend and only seeing them a few times a year is horrible. I worry that when things aren’t working I’m letting my supervisor down. I have to live up to all their expectations of me and make this worthwhile. My whole support network is in another country. There are wellbeing services and things at uni – but they are really general and the waiting lists are so long it’s like I’ll graduate before I get any real help. My mental health is definitely suffering. As an international student the worry about the financial and emotional cost of my PhD is huge. And every time I want to apply for any kind of financial help they ask for a million things and really intrusive information so I just give up.

Even if I did want to stay, it’s not as though getting a job is easy. There are so few positions out there, and everywhere people are being made redundant. I heard somewhere that a CV that won’t get you into a post-doc these days would have been better than one that would have got you tenure 30 years ago! It’s as though expectations just keep going up and up and up and the pressure goes up with them.

I also know I want to have a family and I just don’t see how that’s possible in academia. None of the really senior women I see in the field have children. I know that there are more younger ones coming through who have had kids or who are having kids, but who knows if they will make it to professor? There is so much holding women back in the field, doesn’t being a mom just make it harder? How could I be the kind of parent I want to be and work that hard? That said, I don’t know what I am going to do. Industry seems to be almost as bad. Maybe publishing or editing is the way forward. Something where I can use my science but also have a life.

*

The deliberate inclusion of this anecdote discloses the ‘messy talk of reality’ that aims to use autoethnography pull down barriers between the private and public as a transgressive stance.64(p178)

**

This was said to one of the authorial team by a colleague, and represents a prevailing attitude.